Mimi Kim on gender, the state, and community accountability – Mimi Kim is a second-generation Korean American and long-time organizer against domestic and sexual violence, racism and imperialism. Her pragmatic approach to defending the safety and integrity of women stems from years of work on the ground with women of colour and others who have been marginalized from the mainstream anti-violence movement. We caught up with her to learn more about her perspective on the relationship between interpersonal and state violence, the criminal justice system, and community accountability.

I do recognize that in some spaces, we have to err on the side of safety or the illusion thereof. Trigger warnings aren’t meant for those of us who don’t believe in them just like the Bible wasn’t written for atheists. Trigger warnings are designed for the people who need them, who need that safety.

Those of us who do not believe should have little say in the matter. We can neither presume nor judge what others might feel the need to be protected from.

***

And yet.

There will always be a finger on the trigger. No matter how hard we try, there’s no way to step out of the line of fire.

There are things that rip my skin open and reveal what lies beneath but I don’t believe in trigger warnings.

Lena Palacios's insight:

"I do recognize that in some spaces, we have to err on the side of safety or the illusion thereof. Trigger warnings aren’t meant for those of us who don’t believe in them just like the Bible wasn’t written for atheists. Trigger warnings are designed for the people who need them, who need that safety.

Those of us who do not believe should have little say in the matter. We can neither presume nor judge what others might feel the need to be protected from.

***

And yet.

There will always be a finger on the trigger. No matter how hard we try, there’s no way to step out of the line of fire."

We must build criticality around gender violence in the architecture of our movements. We need to build communities that are committed to ending gender violence and we need real world skills, strategies and plans in place, right now, to deal with the inevitable increase in gender violence that is going to be the colonial response to direct action and on going activism. We need trained people on the ground at our protests and our on the land reclamation camps. We need our own alternative systems in place to deal with sexual assault at the community level, systems that are based on our traditions and do not involve state police and the state legal system."

"Above all, I want to stress that the way in which the state uses time is a method of punishing, even before it seeks to actually penalise you, what I have elsewhere called ‘the weaponisation of time’.

This stretching out of time is a central feature of what punishment is, from the slowness of bringing someone to trial, to the trial process itself, to prison, the purest manifestation of time used as a weapon, against the very nature of what it means to be human."

Tom Meagher: My wife, Jill Meagher, was murdered by a man who can easily be described as the sum of all evils – but we should not fall pray to the 'monster myth'

Lena Palacios's insight:

"By insulating myself with the intellectually evasive dismissal of violent men as psychotic or sociopathic aberrations, I self-comforted by avoiding a more terrifying concept: that violent men are socialised by the ingrained sexism and entrenched masculinity that permeates everything, from our daily interactions all the way up to our highest institutions.

...

I dreamed for over a year of how I would like to physically hurt this man, and still often relish the inevitable manner of his death. But wouldn’t it be more beneficial for Jill’s memory and other women affected by violence to focus on the problems that surround our attitudes, our legal system, our silence rather than focusing on what manner we would like to torture and murder this individual?"

Six Theses on Anxiety and Why It is Effectively Preventing Militancy, and One Possible Strategy for Overcoming It 1 Reposted with the kind permission of the Institute for Precarious Consciousness 1: Each phase of capitalism has its own dominant reactive affect. 2 Each phase of capitalism has a particular...

Lena Palacios's insight:

"Anxiety is reinforced by the fact that it is never clear what “the market” wants from us, that the demand for conformity is connected to a vague set of criteria which cannot be established in advance. Even the most conformist people are disposable nowadays, as new technologies of management or production are introduced. One of the functions of small-group discussions and consciousness raising is to construct a perspective from which one can interpret the situation...

Above all, the process should establish new propositions about the sources of anxiety. These propositions can form a basis for new forms of struggle, new tactics, and the revival of active force from its current repression: a machine for fighting anxiety."

As part of the Transformative Justice Fall Initiative, Project NIA has partnered with artist Micah Bazant to create this curriculum guide which draws on Micah's ongoing collaborative work on the topics of scapegoating and transformative justice. This guide uses the publication Miklat Miklat, a zine co-produced by Micah Bazant and Lewis Wallace, as a jumping off point for discussion and exploration of transformative justice.

"What to do? We are part of and committed to national and local organizing that is building restorative and transformative justice into schools and communities. These philosophies and practices of justice, in contrast to retributive ones, seek to empower communities to respond holistically to violence and harm. Restorative and transformative justice take into account the needs of those affected by an incident of harm, the contexts that produced or shaped harm, and seek to transform or rebuild what was lost rather than view punishment as a final resolution. We desperately need our schools and communities to become restorative and transformative spaces."

"The anti-violence movement buys into the carceral state by advancing “anti-violence” campaigns that rely on arrest, prosecution, and punishment as ways to solve the problem of gender violence. The focus of the problem is individual incidents of abuse rather than public policies that result in state violence against women and queer communities, which are ignored by feminist groups who invest in or accept resources that are tied to the growing punishment industry. Those racial justice organizations that do resist state violence and the concomitant crises that result from mass incarceration see their work in mansculinist terms. Some even point to anti-violence activism as one of the culprits in the mass incarceration of poor men of color. Many fail to understand that the criminal legal system is not only racist, it relies on heteropatriarcal assumptions that narrate a kind of social order that is based on domination."

"In the end, the question is not really about the pros and cons of trigger words. The questions are around, what are the organizing practices and strategies for building movements that recognize that settler colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy have not left us unscathed? How do we create spaces to experiment with different strategies, as well as spaces to openly assess and change these strategies as they inevitably become co-opted? How do we create movements that make us collectively accountable for healing from individual and collective trauma? How do we create critical intellectual spaces that recognize that intellectual work is not disembodied and without material effects? How do we collectively reduce harm in our intellectual and political spaces? And finally, how can we build healing movements for liberation that can include us as we actually are rather than as the peoples we are supposed to be?Beyond the Pros and Cons of Trigger Warnings: Collectivizing Healing Andrea Smith When I used to work as an anti-violence crisis counselor full-time, a counselor in another agency confided in me th...

Lena Palacios's insight:

Great questions: "In the end, the question is not really about the pros and cons of trigger words. The questions are around, what are the organizing practices and strategies for building movements that recognize that settler colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy have not left us unscathed? How do we create spaces to experiment with different strategies, as well as spaces to openly assess and change these strategies as they inevitably become co-opted? How do we create movements that make us collectively accountable for healing from individual and collective trauma? How do we create critical intellectual spaces that recognize that intellectual work is not disembodied and without material effects? How do we collectively reduce harm in our intellectual and political spaces? And finally, how can we build healing movements for liberation that can include us as we actually are rather than as the peoples we are supposed to be?"

By Tamara L. Spira and Heather M. Turcotte We contest the criminalization of UC Santa Barbara feminist studies professor, Dr. Mireille Miller-Young. As feminists dedicated to fostering movements for anti-racist queer positive sexuality, we support Dr. Miller-Young. As feminists who work for the erotic autonomies and collective sexual self-determination of marginalized communities, we support Dr. Miller-Young. As feminists committed to challenging the incessant criminalization, surveillance, and policing of non-normative races, sexualities, and genders of people, we support Dr. Miller-Young. In particular, we wish to question the fetishization of a pure white femininity as that which must be protected at all costs by the state. Historically, constructions of white femininity as privileged property (Harris 1993; Pateman and Mills 2007; Pascoe 2009) have been shored up to “justify” everything from lynchings, to deportation, to the mass expansion of the [...]

How Not to Stop Racism in the Arab American Community – A Response MuslimMatters Claiming accountability and recognizing our complicity are only the first steps we must take to challenge Arab American anti-Black racism.

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